The Jane Austen Society of North American held their annual convention at the Brooklyn Marriott last weekend.

I spotted their booth one year at the Brooklyn Book Festival: the Jane Austen Society of North America, otherwise known as JASNA. I picked up a brochure and chatted with the woman behind the table about Maura Kelly and Jack Murninghan’s  dating advice book that draws lessons from literature, Much Ado About Loving, which I was gearing up to promote the following spring. The book includes Austen themed chapters like “Sex and Sensibility: Are Relationships that Start with Wild Passion Doomed?” and “Bride and Prejudice: Does Wanting to Get Married Give you Champagne Goggles?” She was interested, and gave me her card to send her a copy.

Unfortunately I neglected to ask her a key question: When is your next annual meeting and how can I attend?

The theme this year for the annual general meeting was “Sex, Money and Power in Jane Austen’s Fiction” and it was held in New York (the location changes every year). It seems that everyone is talking about last weekend and the Jane Austen celebration, in an exhaustive report from New York Times, “Lots of Pride, a Little Prejudice,” Forbes declaring “Jane Austen in the ‘Hood” with an attendee’s account  and a straightforward account from the Atlantic Wire: “What Happens at a Jane Austen Society Gathering.”

Basically here’s what happened:

• Cornel West declared his love for Austen on Saturday morning delivering a lecture on power that “brought down the house with a thunderous Saturday morning sermon on Austen’s understanding of human suffering that name-checked Sophocles, Shakespeare, Chekhov and Leo Strauss.”
• Keynote speaker Anna Quindlen riled up the mostly female audience “with a rousing keynote address lamenting two centuries of male condescension to Austen’s seemingly small domestic dramas.”
• Sandy Lerner, the founder of the Chawton House Library analyzed the importance of money in Austen’s novels.
• Kathy Chopra and Bonny Wise explained the ins and outs of petticoats and wigs.
• Jane Austen  herself walked through the streets of New York which was captured in this video.

See you next year in Minneapolis?